Frictionless Environments

When working with clients, at some point they will ask me, “What is the most important thing in a design to you?” My response? “To create frictionless environments.”

The principle of “Frictionless” is critical not only in web design, but in product development, marketing and so many other things we deal with. I define “Frictionless Environments,” as creating spaces where we do not create or do things that trip people up. These days when I design a website or multimedia presentation, I visualize a person gliding through it, as easily as one might drive down an open road. People hate being stuck in traffic jams, usually doing anything possible to avoid them. This seems especially true when people are in a rush.

Points of Friction
Friction comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s also good to keep in mind that friction will always exist, the goal is to minimize it as much as possible.

Typical sources of friction come from:
1. Poorly laid out navigation systems

2. Poorly organized information (to the extent that people cannot figure out where to start)

3. Poor website layout

4. Content clarity (is the information easy for users to understand and concepts clearly expressed)

5. Not giving users a simple and easy way to contact or get support from you

6. Forcing users to click more than is necessary to get specific information

7. Forcing users to fill out a form to obtain basic information about your product (I call this Toll-Boothing)

8. Forms asking for unnecessary information

Tips for Reducing Friction
1. Use common navigation names. (e.g. Products, Services, Contact Us, About Us, Testimonials, etc…). If you offer mystery meat names, this can confuse people, making them guess what’s behind door number three. People prefer clarity in naming conventions.

2. Find ways of organizing your information that makes sense to the largest number of visitors. Information might be organized differently than the way you do it inside your own company (given that the typical visitor may not know about your corporate nomenclature).

3. Create/Enhance your layout to makes clear lanes (flow-path) for visitors. A great example is creating a path for mass market buyers and another for early adopters. Think about how you can answer visitor questions quickly and get them to what they are looking for. Don’t force them to hunt. Hunting influences frustration and reduces your credibility and image. On top of that, people hate to feel stupid. If users cannot find something, they tend feel negative and unsatisfied. Negativity does not inspire sales.

4. Content exists to tell a story. The story should have a beginning, middle and end. It should educate, inform, improve, change or confirm visitor ideas about your products and/or services. The story should end with a “call to action.”

5. Sometimes people coming to your website want only one thing. The phone number. Make sure that your contact information is in a prominent place. Don’t make visitors dig for something which should be very obvious. Also among pages make sure some sort of contact information is there. As the person is looking over information, they may want to send you an email or call, about some specific question about your product. Don’t force them to jump out of that page and go somewhere else to find a way to get in touch with you. Needlessly running someone around your website isn’t friendly.

6. Make clean “flow-paths.” When creating “flow-paths” for visitors, it’s important to organize tasks that can be completed in the fewest steps possible. Anywhere you decrease the number or clicks between the person and the goal they want to reach, decreases “friction.”

7. No "Toll Boothing". When a visitor has to cough up information [just] to learn about your product, you might be putting yourself in a negative light. To visitors this can be a very serious point of friction. The web was founded on the principle of “free and easy” access to information. Forcing visitors to hand over personal information to learn about your product and/or services flies directly in the face of that principle. Don’t get me wrong. I 100% believe in forms and getting user information. I just like to insert that activity in the right place at the right time. Here’s another way to think of it. If you had a booth or stand in a mall, would you force people to fill out a written form to look at one of your brochures or would you just hand it to them? Try not to break social paradigms (ways of looking at things).

8. Do you really want to “require” that phone number for them to get a pamphlet from you? Be careful in what you require. If they give you a “valid” email address that’s great. Requiring a phone number or some other kind of information can seem potentially invasive and will cause some to pause and think about handing over that information (unless they give you a fake number anyway). Know this, people relate their personal information to issues of privacy. If they don’t have a track record with you, they will be less inclined to tell you about themselves. It’s friction, so consider carefully what is on your website forms.

Conclusion
Making our websites as frictionless as possible is critical to gaining both market and mind share. Forced complexity can frustrate users and damage credibility. Friction determines experience. If you don’t believe me, look back on why you prefer one website, product or service over another. It usually boils down to friction. We use what’s easy (frictionless) and tend to avoid the difficult (friction). If you design with that in mind you’ll be creating a win-win situation for both visitors and your business.

// Jaye Morris, Technologist

Speaking off Web Browsers...

As it turns out, a really good article called IE7 Vs. Everyone Else appeared the other day on Internet Week about Microsoft's IE7 and a few other web browsers which are worth your attention. While it doesn't go into depth on all the issues I was talking about in my previous post, it's an excellent read none the less. You'll definitely find some coolness in Internet Week's article. Enjoy!

// Jaye Morris

The Website Browser War and your Bottom Line

Companies and developers can go through a lot of trouble building a website. Despite all the work and effort, developers and site owners can forget one simple fact. It’s something called “browser standards.” What’s odd about browser standards is that they are not “standard.” This can (and should) be troubling, to us all.

Years ago, I myself was guilty of building “killer” sites for a clients, but only slanting it towards Internet Explorer, and then only the current and previous version. The reason? I made (false) assumptions about user behavior and tendencies to upgrade their software. Nothing could be further from the truth. How do I know this? Server logs. I read what people where actually doing. Live and learn is my motto.

Windows, Tigers, and Linux – oh my
I mentioned before the value of web analytics. Well, one item you can see is the type of browsers that people are using when they come to your website. Browser info can be pretty specific as well. You might be a little surprised at how many people still use IE5, instead of IE6. On top of that, you will notice people are using Firefox (which is having amazing market penetration), Netscape (there are those die hard people out there), Opera, Mozilla, Safari and more. Mentioning Safari and Firefox open another door, in how your website will look. Platforms. Shock of shocks. Even though Windows is the most widely used operating systems, Linux (Red Hat and the like) and Unix (Mac OS X) based systems are gaining much larger market share. Websites can look very different on these systems.

What would you do if you opened a brick and mortar business, but only some people could open the door and come in? What if it only opened for people 6 foot 4 and taller. Obviously you would a lot of business. The same principle applies to websites and browser compatibility. Getting this done should be an imperative, for the sake of our businesses.

One Power To Rule Them All
So what the solution to getting consistency, across web browsers and platforms? Is some level of consistency even possible? Good news. Yes! The answer is in something called CSS (cascading style sheets). Keep in mind not all browsers put to use every element of this standard. It might be a little time consuming but generally if you code your CSS to work on both IE and Firefox, you will pretty much cover everything. In truth if you really want to know the most “standards” compliant browser (to code for), that would be Opera which will soon be releasing version 9 of their (now) free browser.

You need to know, you can write CSS in such a way that if your code detects an IE web browser, one type of code will run in the CSS layer and another if another browser type is detected. Developing your website in this way can be a little time consuming, but is well worth the effort. It’s the difference in planning for the long-term as opposed to the short-term. In most instances, it just means creating well-formed code, as the website is being built, redesigned or refactored (the practice of taking old code and improving it so it’s more effective or up to snuff).

Begin With The End In Mind
Keep in mind that the reason that we go to the trouble of writing code that works well among as many web browsers as possible to provide “frictionless” experiences for site visitors. This should be a primary goal for all site owners and developers part.

Frictionless experiences do several things:
1. Makes visitors comfortable (regarding look, feel and style)
2. Consistency helps to build credibility
3. Greater success rate in visitor transactions (visitors getting appropriate info, client conversions, from filling out forms to making a purchase)
4. Enhances confidence in your brand identity and by extension your website, turning lookers into buyers
5. Improves your ROI. Measure twice cut once. If you take a haphazard approach to site development, it can and will cost you significantly more

// Jaye Morris, Technologist